From Perception to Pixels: Human-Derived Visually Distinct Colors for Improved Dominant Color Extraction

Abstract

Dominant color extraction is a fundamental task in computer vision, with applications in design, image retrieval, and content recommendation. However, conventional algorithms based on device-oriented color spaces (e.g., RGB) and fixed quantization often fail to capture how humans perceive color differences. In this study, we propose a human-perception-based framework for dominant color extraction, built on a novel Human Color Dictionary (HCD) derived from a perceptual experiment. Participants (n=110) were sequentially shown 120 colors and asked to identify those they perceived as unique. Based on their responses, we constructed a 120 by 120 co-occurrence matrix and applied a greedy selection algorithm to derive 64 perceptually distinct colors, forming the HCD. This dictionary was integrated into RGB color histogram and K-means color extraction algorithms by initializing centroids and mapping pixel values to their nearest perceptual color using the deltaE 00 distance. Evaluation on a dataset of 4,562 images paired with expert-designed palettes demonstrated that our method improves perceptual alignment, as measured by Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and best-match distance. Our findings suggest no meaningful gender differences in the number of uniquely perceived colors, indicating that sex does not significantly influence color perception in this task. Another key finding is that highly saturated colors are perceived as the most distinguishable, whereas dark and deep colors tend to perceptually collapse and are less reliably differentiated. The results confirm that incorporating experimentally derived human color representations ensures the generated color clusters align more closely with human perception, thus improving the usability of color palette generation in practical applications.